Yeah, it's more or less that time again, for the 2007 summer mapmaking contest. Usually this takes place in July -- however, this year I'm synchronizing the end of this contest with Kinetic Turtle's 7/7/07 meetup, and as such, the contest has to be held in June instead.

The February Contest yielded Victory Dance III, which I believe is an outstanding pack in its own right. Every edition of Victory Dance has been better than the previous one, and I hope to continue that pattern for Victory Dance IV, which will come out some time in July -- the fruits of this contest.

IF YOU'RE INTERESTED, HERE ARE THE RULES:- The deadline is July 4, 2007 -- as of this post, you have three weeks in which you must have submitted your map.- ONLY NETMAPS ARE ALLOWED.- Any ORIGINAL netmap that was not published or distributed before June 13 will be allowed. - No remakes or combination maps. I am judging your map on its creativity and originality.- No 7-polygon maps. Your map will be judged on the depth of your mapping as well.- Only one map per person. The last file received by any competitor on July 4 will be judged.- No collaborating. The map must be constructed by you, and you alone, though you are free to playtest it with other people. You may also ask for advice to a reasonable degree -- just not from me.- No CTF maps or any map that requires scripts -- just for simplicity's sake.- All maps must use DEFAULT INFINITY SHAPES, SOUNDS, PHYSICS, etc.- Maps cannot be altered with JUICE or Chisel. This can cause more problems than it's worth, and great maps can be made without their help.

I will judge the maps on a 70-point scale. The map that scores the most points out of 70 is the winner of the contest. The scoring table is below:

FLOW: 25 points- As in, how facilitated is player movement, how easy is it to find combat, how well you can find the guns, how fast and succinct the corridors and lifts are, etc. etc. Being that flow is the most important factor in any map, it's worth the most points. When I score this section, I always start with 25 points and then make deductions for any errors. February's winner (Russian Dance) lost one of only two points on a ledge that it appears you can jump down, but can't. Remember, the little things do matter.

BALANCE: 20 points- Misplaced spawn points, blind teleports, slow-moving doors, skewed weapon locations, ridiculously overpowered guns based on map design, excessive health or powerups, or any instance where the surviving player holds a massive advantage over any other player will cause this to go down. This section will also be graded very harshly; there's nothing less fun than an unfair map. It's not hard to score most or all of the points here, as long as you are conscious of where things are in your map.

ARCHITECTURE AND DEPTH: 10 points- The depth of your polygon and texture usage goes here. Attention to detail, "eye candy," fancy lighting, and what-have-you all factor into this. A map that is nice to look at will do better here, but remember: don't sacrifice flow for good architecture.

FUN: 10 points- Proper weapon placement, a good level of carnage without being excessive or unfair, and a properly-sized map are all good factors of sheer fun. Flow does not necessarily mean fun; however, "fun" is a lot more subjective and thus less valuable score-wise.

ORIGINALITY: 5 points- If your map, in design, is unique, you will get the full points here. It's quite possible to get 4 or 5 points with a one-room map, but you will lose points quickly if your map bears a striking resemblance to something else or doesn't bring anything clever at all to the table. The contest is not an exercise in the status quo; spend some time on your map and do something special.

Your map is not guaranteed a section-by-section critique of your map (i.e. why your map only got 12 points for Flow), but you will be scored.

For the July 2006 contest, I made a handy-dandy checklist that is both useful in general, but also a great tool for maximizing your score. The checklist won't prevent you from making a poor map by itself, but it covers most of the details that can make a mediocre map good, and a good map great.

Remember: the deadline is July 4, 3 weeks from the start of this contest. Testing and scoring will take place primarily on July 7. Anyone is allowed to compete, and to be honest, I would really like to see a larger turnout this time. The February contest only had 9 entries, and I know there are enough good mappers in the woodwork here to come out with some really cool stuff. Even if you don't win, it's a great learning experience and gets more people involved in the process of content creation. If you haven't made a map before, there's no reason not to give it a shot; Legacy Typhoon's first map, You Better Move, got 7th place in the contest and became part of Victory Dance III.

For Victory Dance IV, the top few maps will be merged into a pack and distributed. This will probably turn out to be around 7 maps, as is the usual deal, but if there are a lot of high-quality entries then the pack will be larger (and this is beneficial for everyone). You have three weeks to do this, folks. Put in some effort and come out with something great.

To submit your map, e-mail it to RyokoTK@Gmail.com -- do not submit it as an attachment on the Pfhorums or send it to me by any other means. You are not allowed to seek critique from me, because that just wouldn't be fair. Your score will be reserved until the contest is over; I WILL NOT score it until after July 4, so don't ask me that either. Also, if you release your map to the public after you send it to me, but before the contest is over, the map is disqualified. After the contest ends, whether or not your map is published in Victory Dance IV, you may publish it yourself.

Disclaimer: Submitting your map to me means you grant me the right to distribute your map as part of a map pack on Fileball. You will be credited appropriately for your map. I reserve the right to disqualify any map or mapmaker for any reason not listed above at any time, or no reason at all. If you have any complaints, questions, queries, or anything else like that, you know how to contact me.

Last edited by RyokoTK on Jun 13th '07, 23:10, edited 1 time in total.

I'm not going to make an official declaration on JUICE. If it comes out before the contest is finished, then great. If not, oh well. You aren't guaranteed a higher score in the architecture department because you have more textures to use. Also, multiple liquids is possible via Chisel, which has never been banned from the contest.

Last edited by RyokoTK on Jun 13th '07, 22:37, edited 1 time in total.

W wrote:Keep in mind that you will probably have to JUICE/chisel the map yourself when making the final merged pack. (and you will have to have their unmerged maps)

JUICE's alterations shouldn't be a problem in the merging process unless you open then in Forge and mess with the individual level. I've definitely merged pre-Chiseled maps when compiling Magenta Filter (Herecomethej sent a map and I just unmerged it from "itself" and put it into MF). However, I'll try it now just to be sure.

OK, I confirmed that, at least in merging texture-converted maps, JUICE doesn't screw anything up. I don't think anything else will mess up merge; the only thing that will be affected is the level comment, which is in a custom chunk that Forge discards during merge.

EDIT: Of course, if you don't want people to JUICE it, I'm sure you have your reasons. I'm just upholding the reputation of the JUICE.

I just mindlessly included JUICE with chisel in that post because there's a good chance the texture converter stuff won't be officially released before the contest. Of course, someone can always get it with SVN.

Are there going to be any competitions for single player maps? Net-maps just aint my thing.

Not for several reasons:

1) Making single-player maps is a much more difficult and time-consuming process; for a lot of people, that's just too much of a commitment.2) Netmaps require less effort and thus entice more people into participating.3) It would be very hard for anyone to judge a batch of single-player maps, especially the bad ones.

Solo maps CAN be less flow intensive and you CAN plan individual battles that happen in discreet places making them potentially easier to make, but maps like that are generally uninspired and boring. Whereas net maps have to account for any battle that can happen anywhere and offer multiple routes of attack and evasion, the more you integrate this approach in solo maps the more awesome they'll be. The best way to hone that aspect of solo mapping is by making net maps, i implore you to try your hand at it Tommy your projects benefit greatly.

screamingfool wrote:Solo maps CAN be less flow intensive and you CAN plan individual battles that happen in discreet places making them potentially easier to make, but maps like that are generally uninspired and boring. Whereas net maps have to account for any battle that can happen anywhere and offer multiple routes of attack and evasion, the more you integrate this approach in solo maps the more awesome they'll be. The best way to hone that aspect of solo mapping is by making net maps, i implore you to try your hand at it Tommy your projects benefit greatly.

Sure I'll try it. I've got one dead simple one on the go and another one that takes full advantage of chisel's oval effect but it crashes forge every time. I could really do with pfhorge but I can never find it anywhere.

Tommy-TBone wrote:I'm experiencing a glitch in my map where you bounce forwards very quickly in some places for no reason. Any idea what causes this?

I don't know the cause for it, but the fix is generally to delete all affected polygons (I mean every one that is near the bouncy!) and re-think your design. Sometimes it can be fixed by changing the way you connect the polys - change a triangle to a parallelogram or remove as many lines as possible.

Personally, that's my least favorite bug to fix, so good luck.

Disqualified Burn!

Ugh, you stole my map name. Now I have to start over.

Last edited by epstein on Jun 14th '07, 21:34, edited 1 time in total.

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